Social Interaction

How does social interaction and emotion influence academic anxiety and academic performance?

Continuing my focus on affective neuroscience, we interested in exploring how academic anxiety is related to emotional expression, affective communication, and the “contagion” of anxiety across social networks. Though there are a myriad of factors that may contribute to this “contagion” of anxiety in academic domains like math (Beilock, Gunderson, Ramirez, & Levine, 2010; Maloney, Ramirez, Gunderson, Levine, & Beilock, 2015), including social dynamics and expectations, we hypothesize that some of this mimicry of anxious behaviors lies in the perception and imitation of negative affective cues, and social environmental cues, and utilizing these negative emotional signals to guide behavior during stressful academic situations. I will analyze these interpersonal dynamics across three levels:

1) Investigating the role of emotional expressivity in math anxiety: do academically anxious individuals physically express more negative emotion through nonverbal cues?

2) Using psychophysiology in the lab, I will evaluate how affective cues expressed by others affect emotions and academic processing in anxious individuals.

3) Using social network analysis, we will evaluate social contagion of academic anxiety across larger populations of students and investigate the associations between academic anxiety, social networks, and educational outcomes.

This work will reveal important insights into how affective cues and peer influence may create reciprocal influences on anxiety in academic domains, and may also relate to educational outcomes. This line of research will elucidate how social networks may influence our own anxiety and academic outcomes, such as choice of classes and careers. Conversely, we will investigate how enrolling in specific classes and majors can also serve to reciprocally alter our own academic anxiety and attitudes, and social connections. This line of research may be especially interesting with respect to younger students, as gaining an understanding as to how peers influence math anxiety in young children and adolescents will give us a better understanding of the neurodevelopmental basis of anxiety in academic domains. Gaining a better understanding of the social and affective cues that underlie academic anxieties will improve our understanding of the experience of anxiety and prevention of its spread in academic environments.